The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

Introduction
As the main topic in the following deals with the relevance of cultural knowledge, I
draw further on scholars like McCarthy (1996) and Barth (2002), who have argued for
a perspective that recognises knowledge as a major modality of culture. Using knowledge
as synonym for culture, it may be defined as what humans employ to interpret and act
on the world. This caption involves all the ways of understanding we use to make up
our experienced reality, including feelings, thoughts, attitudes and embodied skills.
Accordingly, knowledge may be defined as »any and every set of ideas and acts accepted
by one or another social group or society of people – ideas and acts pertaining to
what they accept as real for them and for others« (McCarthy 1996: 23). The search for
knowledge is inevitably a part of all human life. All societies have generalisation procedures
that turn individual knowledge into culturally constructed knowledge. I assume
that this has to be encountered as a social, historical and transitory product integral
to the respective cultural system it has been generated in. It is thus understood
within the broader category of culture, as an entire range of phenomena that include
the manifold types of knowledges, symbols, and images used in the various domains
of human life. Just as knowledge cannot be approached unrelated to other aspects of
social relations, neither can conservation be separated from socio-cultural dimensions
of societies, nor can perceptions of nature be explored without an understanding of
the entire cultural realm. As initially outlined, this is a foundation of research in the
field of indigenous knowledge that has gained increased attention.
A diversity of topics are being studied under this rubric and there are as vast a
number of concepts and positions on how to approach the issue. As it is still a relatively
new field, I endeavour specifically to give a survey of the multiple approaches in
a review of current theory and practice. In conceptual terms, the discussion applies
two main approaches as developed in anthropology of indigenous knowledge and anthropology
of landscape to analyse indigenous knowledge expressions and perceptions of nature. In
methodological terms, I combine discourse analysis with qualitative methods of ethnographic
inquiry. In consonance with scholars like Long Martello and Jasanoff
(2004), who argue that there is a need to integrate ethnographic and micro-focused
accounts of local institutions and cultures with more systemic and macro-focused perspectives
on globalisation, I assume that contemporary indigenous culture must be
explained with reference to national and global structures. By focusing on factors that
link local landscapes to global processes, the idea of a translocal connectedness
through which global processes shape and are influenced by local spaces is presented.
It involves an expanded view to broader explanatory cultural frameworks, following
the idea that politics and economics are inherent to a definition of culture.
In essence, the qualitative research is about understanding human behaviour from
the perspective of the particular people involved. My work draws on twelve months
of field research carried out between May 2001 and March 2003 among Q'eqchi' communities
located in rural areas of conservational importance in Alta Verapaz. To thoroughly
explore local expressions of indigenous environmental knowledge, participant
observation and semi-structured interviews with key informants at the household level
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